Sometimes I can’t resist reading the opinion pieces in the Burlington Free Press. My wife is much more disciplined than I am: she knows they’ll just piss her off. I should know it too, but I read them anyway.

So the other day I caught this gem on syndication from the Washington Post.

It’s more about the defeat of Joe Lieberman in Conecticut, and they’re following along with the Republican Party line. I swear, you would think the memo went out not just to the party apparatchiks but also to their mouthpieces in the media.

So the line is this: Defeating Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was Stalinism. Yes, you got that right: Like Stalin, the operatives who ousted Lieberman are determined to remove dissidents from The Party.

So believe it or not, voting for the candidate of your choice is the same as carrying out show trials and mass executions. Didn’t know you had it in you, did you?

As the story progresses we see a couple of different, and mutually inconsistent lines, unfold.

First is the Lamont=Stalin line. Voting against the incumbent is a purge, and shows how the wild-eyed radicals have taken over the Party.

Second is the idea that this development is great for the Republicans, exactly what they were looking for. I don’t know about you, but the squeals like a stuck pig that I hear coming from the Republicans don’t sound like cheers.

Third, although I guess they’ve downplayed this line since the election, is the idea that Lieberman is really a real liberal, more liberal than Lamont, and he’s the guy to support if you want the real Democrat.

Who are these guys to be telling us what to do in our party?

I thought the purpose of elections was to vote for the candidate you agree with, and against the candidate you disagree with. Next time around maybe we should ask permission before we go into the voting booth.

Here’s what I’m sick of hearing: “I don’t vote for the party, I vote for the person.”

We hear it a lot in Vermont, and I think that people usually mean it when they say it. The problem is, it’s a stupid thing to say. If you don’t know what political party a candidate is a member of you don’t know enough to vote for him or her. You don’t know how they will vote on some of the most crucial votes: majority leader, Speaker of the House, control of the body. You don’t know where they will look for guidance, where they will get their aides or draw from for their political appointments. You don’t know the overall agenda they will be pursuing and who will help them get there. No office holder can know everything, so they will inevitably defer to the party on a myriad of decisions.

You may think you’re voting for the person, but you’re voting for the party.

It’s important, and we’re seeing it a lot this year.

First we have Connecticut. Joe Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat, and he’s trying to pretend that he still is. It was the Democratic Party that helped him get elected to Connecticut Attorney General, and U.S. Senate, and that put him on the ticket as our candidate for Vice President. It was Democrats across his state and across the country that gave money for his campaigns, raised money for his campaigns, knocked on doors, made phone calls, and put him where he is today. Yet somehow he thinks he’s bigger than the party. He thinks the party owes him, but he has it backwards. He owes the party for all the years the party supported him. He ran for reelection in the primary, nothing wrong with that, but running in the primary means you’re offering yourself as the party’s choice. They vote for you, you’re the candidate of the party, the party will work for you and hopefully try to get you elected; they vote against you and someone else is the candidate. The voters made their choice, but that’s what they’re supposed to do. He owes it to the party to accept the decision of the voters and get out of the race. He hasn’t done it yet, but I still think there’s a chance he may.

As I said, he owes the party, but he hasn’t repaid the party’s support. He supports Bush’s war, like some other Democrats. Unlike most other Democrats, though, he refuses to even look at the possibility he might have been wrong. He’s also taken Bush’s position in trying to dismantle Social Security, which is pretty much a bedrock principle for Democrats. He has also taken every chance to attack the party, and to repeat the Cheney line that anyone who questions the President is a traitor.

We have a little different situation here in Vermont. The Progressive Party grew out of the Progressive Coalition, the original Sanderistas who elected Bernie mayor back in the 1980’s (even before I moved to Vermont!), but Bernie has been very consistent in running as an Independent, not a Progressive.

He hasn’t claimed to be bigger than the party, but he definitely stakes out a position outside of any party. In years past he attacked the Democratic Party, but I haven’t heard as much of that since he got to Congress. Maybe the fact that he caucuses with the Democrats is part of it. Or maybe he sees that he really does fit in the Democratic Party of John Conyers, Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold, and Paul Wellstone.

I remember when Bernie ran for Congress. I’m not talking about the first time, when he and Paul Poirier split the center-left vote, but the second time, when he won. I remember clearly having lunch with a group of colleagues and commenting that he was creating a problem for the Democratic Party, because if he got elected to Congress as an independent it would be impossible for the Democrats to ever run a candidate for that seat, and that’s exactly what happened. In a state that has become increasingly Democratic, he was an obstacle to one of the top slots in the lineup. Still, it was in the interest of the party to support him, or to not oppose him, because the positions Bernie takes are Democratic Party positions. When his ideas advance, Democratic ideas advance. It’s a benefit, but it’s come at a cost.

I’ve been a justice of the peace for years. One of the things we do is count ballots every election day. It’s mostly done by machine, but we have to hand count the write-ins. Every year we’ve had to count a lot of write-ins for Bernie in Montpelier, because people always write his name in on the Democratic ballot. I’m sure it’s enough to get him on the ballot on the Democratic line, but every year he declines to run as a Democrat.

This year it’s different. This year he filed a written consent with the Secretary of State, agreeing to have his name on the Democratic primary ballot. He’s going to win, no doubt about it. He’s also been campaigning with the D’s, supporting our candidates, and the party has been supporting him. We decided early on not to run a candidate against him because we know that a three-way race is the only way the Republicans can take the seat.

But he’s on the Democratic ballot, not because of write-ins but by his own choice, he’s going to win the primary, and he should do the same thing Lieberman should do: he owes it to the people who have supported him for decades to accept the decision of the voters and accept the nomination of the party.

Stay on the Democratic ticket, Bernie.

This is big news! Ned Lamont is coming to Vermont this week. He’s joining the other Democratic headliners, Pat Leahy, Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, and Scudder Parker at a fundraiser for DFA Friday night in Burlington.

Here’s the ticket information. Tickets are fifty bucks (hey, it’s a fundraiser) and the event is at Union Station at Main Street Landing.

Let’s get out and celebrate a big win for the good guys!

You may remember the story of Rachel Corrie. She was the young peace activist who was killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003, killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes.

They wrote a play about her life, based on her writings, and it was very successful over in London, so successful that they were going to bring it over here and present it at the New York Theater Festival. The problem was that the theater was afraid of the reaction they would get, so they pulled the plug on the production.

Now, what you couldn’t see in New York you can see here in Vermont. The Unadilla Theatre in Marshfield is presenting a play based on Corrie’s writings for two weeks, starting tonight.

(They couldn’t get the rights to put the same play on, but they thought it was important to present her ideas.
Here’s the contact information:
Reservations and Information: 802-456-8968 or at : unadilla@pshift.com

501 Blachly Road
Marshfield Vermont 05658.

You can read more about it in this week’s Seven Days.

Go see it.

This is a word that gets tossed around all too much these days, especially in a world that seems determined to make the word superfluous.

Still, there is no other word for this piece from today’s Slate magazine.

I won’t give away the whole story, but the headline reads: Why is George Bush reading Camus?

If you are to believe this claim (and it comes in a long line of incredible claims about W’s vacation reading), our President is quite the student of philosophy, fond of discussing the origins of existentialism with Press Secretary Tony Snow.

So let’s just put this up to a vote:

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Donald Rumsfeld briefed the President this morning. He told Bush
that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq. To everyone’s
amazement, all of the color ran from Bush’s face, and then he collapsed onto
his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost whimpering.

Finally, he composed himself and asked Rumsfeld,  “Rummy, just exactly how many is a brazillion?”

It may be a forgone conclusion, but I think it’s worth doing what we can to dissuade Lieberman from his plan to run as an independent. I don’t think any of us in Vermont can expect him to listen to us, but there is one Vermont Democrat who may be able to get Lieberman’s ear.

Last night i sent Senator Leahy an e-mail asking him to urge Lieberman not to run as an Independent. If you want to do the same thing you can use this form to send Senator Leahy a message.

I assume a lot of the readers of this site are pretty heavily into politics, so I’ll throw this question out to all of you:

Does anyone remember any off-year primary election, especially one featuring an incumbent, or any primary election at all that drew 48% of the eligible voters?

I sure don’t! Holy Joe certainly wasn’t expecting it. Remember? One of his big stated reasons for considering a run as an Independent was that it wouldn’t be fair to the people of Connecticut if he were kicked out based on a majority vote of 8-10% of the population, he has always been the senator of all Connecticuters (??), blah blah blah.

Tonight the Courant is calling it a record turnout, and I’d be hard put to gainsay that, but maybe you know better.

So why is this big? First off, because a loss of an incumbent in a primary is always big. Second, because it shows the salience of the war for the base of the Democratic Party.

But most of all because the issues in this race were big enough to mobilize a ton of voters across the state, and they voted for change.

So shouldn’t this teach our fellow Democrats that they need to man the fuck up and oppose?

That’s what I’d like to take from this.

WCAX is reporting that Lieberman has conceded, although he is still promising to run as an Independent.

The Courant also has this.

Any ideas on how to talk him out of it?

Sorry it’s been so quiet on my end. I’m on vacation atDemocrat Vacation Central–that’s right, Martha’s Vineyard. Not much chance to blog from the beach, I’m afraid.

Still, I noticed a couple of bright spots in today’s news. Since we naturally tend toward the grim and alarmist, I thought I’d link to these:

First we have this story showing that Holy Joe is having more and more problems with his reelection campaign in Connecticut. The new Quinnipiac poll shows Lamont leading 54% to 41%. I don’t know what it will take for the party to convince him that Party money isn’t going to be there for him and the only way for him to hang on to the last shred of dignity is to go away when he loses.

Second, news from the Midwest. In the continuing seesaw about science versus religion in the Kansas science curriculum the moderate, pro-evolution (i.e. pro-science) candidates have won, which will lead to a 6-4 majority in favor of teaching evolution.
You have to wonder when reality will start to intrude. I’ve had two kids go through the process of applying for college, and they’ve both wound up where they wanted to go. I know it’s a big strain for high school seniors. I can’t imagine having to apply for college, maybe for a science or pre-med curriculum, and coming from a school system that doesn’t believe in evolution. Even being educated by people who think creationism (I know they call it intelligent design, but it’s just another name for creationism) is science seems likely to set you back intellectually and in the competition with other graduates.

Give the recent history in Kansas we can’t assume things will stay this way, but we can always hope.

That’s it for me right now. See you when I get back from the ocean!